


a fish hook, an open eye

by marrowbones



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Domestic, Dreams, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Manipulation, Mildly Dubious Consent, Post-Episode 159
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:12:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22351618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marrowbones/pseuds/marrowbones
Summary: Jon and Martin take a surreal holiday after escaping the Lonely. Everything would be fine if only Jon's strange dreams of Jonah Magnus would stop.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Jonathan Sims, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 14
Kudos: 142





	a fish hook, an open eye

**Author's Note:**

> That laugh of Jon's, y'all. I don't know where we're going from here.

Jon doesn't think much of the little girl watching him at the grocery store at first. Small children are always staring, and this one is bundled like a loaf of bread all the way up to her chin, so only her huge, solemn eyes peek out from the swathe of blanket and beanie tucked around her. Enough of the Lonely lingers about both him and Martin that people have only just started to dodge politely around them on the sidewalk again, hold doors, make room for them on the tube. Being a baby's object of scrutiny is a novelty at this point. Jon readjusts his handful of produce so he has a few fingers free to wave, then goes back to contemplating apples and loses track of her when her father pushes the stroller further down the aisle. 

She is watching again when Martin rejoins him at the checkout. Her father is two people behind them, and she has a tiny pumpkin in her lap. Martin, with his windblown hair and nose pink with cold, makes a face at her, which draws an irrepressible little smile to Jon's lips while the baby continues to look dubiously at him, ignoring Martin completely.

“I think she likes you,” Martin says. 

“Hm,” Jon replies, still busy watching Martin beam down at her, a brightness to his face that hasn't been there for months. “Questionable taste.” 

Martin scoffs with fake outrage and turns that brightness on him. “Excuse you, she has _excellent_ taste, actually,” he says, and more than just his nose turns pink. 

Jon has to look away, then, so he looks back at the girl. Her eyes are enormous and fixed on him, and...that's normal, right? Babies stare. It shouldn't make Jon's stomach twist with unease at the memory of Robert Smirke's daughter. Jon himself was a serious baby; in the few photos he has from before his parents died, he is a severe, unsmiling infant buttoned up in oxford cloth and sweater vests which he never, apparently, outgrew. Being out in public after so long in the Archives might make him feel exposed, but if he went around getting paranoid about every small child whose field of vision he happened into, he'd be liable to draw exactly the kind of attention they are looking to avoid.

Fortunately, the line shuffles forward, and the woman behind Jon shakes out a reusable bag, obscuring the stroller from view. Jon doesn't see the father's eyes glance up to him when he turns to put his apples on the checkout counter.

-

Martin is as good at cooking as he is at making tea, which is to say he does both with a sort of absent care that speaks to long practice. On the third day after they surface from the tunnels beneath the Institute, Jon gets out of the shower to find Martin returned from checking in with Basira and in the middle of—

“Is that _bread_?”

Sure enough, Martin is up to his wrists in flour, a sticky blob redolent with the smell of yeast in a bowl on the counter, and Jon has the privilege of watching him go faintly pink, which he's been doing a lot of lately.

“It’s uh—yeah, it’s um, cheaper to make sometimes than to buy?”

Jon doesn't pay as much mind to the explanation as he should, being distracted by the dash of flour across Martin’s cheek. 

"Basira's coming over for dinner later,” he continues. “I thought it might be nice to have a real meal.”

Jon’s stomach pangs at the mere suggestion. In the Archives, they'd subsisted on whatever Basira brought back to prepare with break room amenities, which were never meant for much more than reheating. And while Jon has relied on little other than statements for a while now, the idea of sitting down to food that hasn't come out of plastic wrap is so hideously _welcome_ that the hunger is a reflex. 

“That sounds good,” Jon says with so much enthusiasm he surprises even himself. He crosses over to the counter where Martin is standing in front of the mixing bowl to inspect the dough. 

“Soon as I finish mixing this, we can leave it to sit for a few hours,” Martin continues. Jon starts when Martin bumps him with his hip. “You can help me clean the chicken for the soup.” His sideways smile makes it a question, and Jon eases. 

“I’m not much of a cook,” he says. 

“I’ll teach you.”

“You've got, ah...” Jon is reaching out before his brain has time to catch up, and Martin turns, stills to allow Jon to wipe away the flour streak across Martin’s cheekbone with his thumb. Martin hasn't shaved today, and there is a sandy scrape of texture where Jon's knuckles brush against his jaw. He is more careful than he maybe needs to be, but touching him so freely is still new.

Jon lets his hand drop and lets out a breath he didn't realize he was holding. Martin is flushed now to the roots of his hair. For that matter, so is Jon, if the heat in his cheeks is anything to go by. That’s probably the reason why he flinches like a startled stray when Martin takes his hand, but Martin holds on. So does Jon.

“Y-you said something about soup.” Jon finally gets out. 

Martin makes a distant affirmative sound. 

“And…and after?”

After, they turn the soup down low to simmer and leave the bread to rise in a sunny spot on the counter. 

-

Jon walks helpless and unseen through so many of his own dreams that it is no surprise to find himself before a table littered with architectural sketches in a 19th century drawing room, surrounded by people heedless of his presence. More noteworthy is the tidy absence of the usual terror, replaced instead with muted calm like the eye of a storm. Beyond the table, the rest of the room is swallowed in shadow, four men’s faces lit from a low angle which casts their flickering silhouettes against the walls. 

Jon _thinks_ there are four of them. At least two, plus one space where a man should be that drags strangely at the eye, and one man-shaped void of fog, still others lurking around the edges of the light. Only one man he recognizes from his portrait in the Institute lobby. 

“Look here, Robert,” he is saying, pen scrawling madly across the corner of a page, “if we use your structural design and divide the cell blocks like so, you’ll have your even distribution if you place the Eye at the center to guard them all in stasis. That ought to be balance enough, don't you think?”

He steps back to let the other three gather over his cursory sketch and murmur amongst themselves, his eyes shining with a familiar fervor. 

And then Jonah Magnus looks up—right at Jon. 

The air seizes in his lungs. Between them passes the spark of a light before the flame catches, the kind that Jon has burned his fingers on countless times before. Rife with the aspiration to consume. 

He wakes up reaching, breathless, his heart beating nightmare-fast. But the grey daylight creeping through the curtains of Martin's bedroom disappoints him, somehow, a strange break from the welcome relief that greets him when he leaves his dreams behind. There had been no Eye in the dream, this time, just the certainty of its presence without the monstrous awe. And no statements, although that want grows sharper every day.

Just Jonah Magnus. Or—Elias, he supposes. The eyes are the same, so what does it matter? 

-

The window in Martin’s kitchen looks onto an unremarkable view of the backs of neighboring flats. It’s been getting dark earlier and light later, and the roofs of the buildings are only just starting to gain a thin, luminous edge of sunrise. The light inside carves out Jon's silhouette in the dark of the window glass where he stands with a cup of tea in his hands. 

It was a library, this time. Severely wrought windows and dark wood shelves. The quiet shuffling of pages and scratch of a quill. Jonah Magnus had an easy smile and the lines on his face to suggest he did it often, and he’d come up behind the man seated at one of the tables and put a companionable hand on his shoulder, enough to make the man sit up and turn to him.

The text before the man had been simultaneously nonsense, no language and every language. Was it the Institute library after all? Or some private country estate? When Jon looked closer, the man himself was weary and unkempt. A face that refused recognition, with dark circles under his eyes, and Jonah Magnus had his hand on the nape of the man’s neck, shifting up to card fingers through his hair. The man sighed as he pressed into his palm, making Jon’s skin prickle with embarrassment to witness such a private moment. 

But he looked up again, woke again, to Jonah Magnus’s eyes on him, electric as touch, though Jon had been out of arm's reach across the desk.

Jon sips his bitter tea. He _would_ want Jon to be paranoid right now, just as he’s trying not to see. Not to know. And yet the part of him that still hungers for answers wonders if these are Elias's dreams, or if he is lending Jon memories as he had inflicted horror on Melanie and Martin. If he should place the blame on the mask or the true face beneath it.

Cocooned in the quiet before the rest of the world wakes, his gaze wanders to his own reflection for want of a face to address the question to.

A thoughtful silence, in which Jon can picture the head tilt, the pursed lips, and then the answer supplies itself: Elias will do for now. It's just as well, since Jonah Magnus feels like a stranger, difficult to summon proper anger for even though the only thing that has changed is the name; he was always the pin-neat man in tailored suits who gave Jon's performance reviews, frowned at Jon when he stayed too late at the Archives, and who murdered two people and smiled with all of his teeth when Daisy put a gun to his head and threatened to call his bluff. 

But now there are decades, centuries beyond that that Jon can hardly begin to imagine. Before, he'd had only the Institute's collection of letters and the cobbled-together knowledge he'd been able to glean from his own investigations, and it turns out that the man himself had watched Jon's struggle all this time. Familiar heat flares at the memory of Elias's reticence to offer even the slightest guidance, but more powerful than that is the burning curiosity. Two hundred years is a long time, and some ravenous part of Jon lately left to gather dust stirs at the temptation. What would it be like to crack open that skull so every grudging answer was bared to the light? He wants to ask. Why did he break with Smirke in the years after Millbank's completion? What hand did he have in Albrecht von Closen's end? Was balance ever what he wanted, what he sought, or was he just as hapless and human as the rest of them—was he _ever_ as hapless and human as the rest of them? 

He is opening his mouth to speak with static on his tongue before he catches himself. He presses the hot ceramic of his mug to his cheek to banish the impulse. 

An amusement that isn’t his knots in his stomach, and he shivers.

“Since when have you _ever_ offered answers freely?” Jon mutters, dismayed by the shred of foolish optimism that wants him to ask anyway, just to see if this time will be different. It would be a simple enough thing to find him; he already knows the address of Elias’s flat from the days after the Prentiss attack. Knows, too, that the kitchen is all clean tile and the smell of coffee this time of day, and there is enough for two. 

A languid satisfaction suggests itself, then, the luxurious stretch after a good night's rest that Jon is sleep-deprived enough to want to curl into, tantalizing in its promise of—what, exactly? In the panopticon, Elias’s pleasure had been almost tangible, stitched into the air of the place alongside the knowledge of what it was, the old terror still steeped in the prison walls. _This_ feeling has the same texture but with an odd indulgence to it, what might be _invitation_ that Jon resolutely ignores. 

Elias is just toying with him, surely. He won his bet, according to Martin, so he is making the most of it. It's just the curiosity eating at him, he tells himself as he turns bodily away from his own gaze in the reflection of the window. Just curiosity, and whatever connection had been there snaps like a thread, and Jon’s throat does _not_ tighten with regret.

-

“It's not soapy, exactly, I just don't care for the taste.”

Jon is perched on the counter to steal bits of the carrot he chopped for the stir fry Martin is making. “I'll eat it if it's in something, but I'd rather not, if I can avoid it.” 

“So you're one of the mythical ambivalent ones, then,” Martin says sagely, trying not to grin. 

“It's a stupid dichotomy,” Jon replies with a shrug and pops a piece of carrot into his mouth. “There’s no need to make such a fuss about preferences.” 

“Spoken like a true diplomat,” Martin says, but his eyes are twinkling. “Building bridges, you are.” 

He pretends to dodge when Jon swats him amiably with the back of his hand, but Jon doesn't really mind. It is a relief to be talking about such inconsequential things. The whole flat smells of onion, ginger and garlic, and Martin is concentrating very hard on stirring the contents of the pan in order to hide his smile. The knot of tension in the pit of Jon’s stomach continues to unwind, little by little. 

A perfect moment, then, for the Eye to exact its toll. 

He's been shut away in the Archives so long, cut off by the Lonely, that when it comes, he isn't braced for that magnetic pull, the taste of metal as his whole body comes to attention, and he is already moving toward the door before he can think how strange it is that weeks have passed away from the Institute, and only now does this urging arrive, slipping through the soft tissue between his ribs to seize tight. 

Martin calls his name, but his voice fades beneath the static in his ears. Strains of a statement float through the hallway, miles better than the cooking smells. Opened envelopes poorly resealed and rifled-through parcels. The discovery of stacks and stacks of letters immaculately sorted. A gaunt coworker fired for stealing mail gone mysteriously missing. The dark chocolate decadence of Beholding. 

“Jon!” 

Jon blinks. Abruptly, the pattern of Martin's sweater fills his vision. They are in the stairwell outside Martin’s flat. Over Martin’s shoulder, at the bottom of the stairs, a man with a bag emblazoned with the postal service's emblem is feeding letters into mail slots. He is unremarkable save for the lure of _statement_ that hangs over him, but as with the others from weeks ago, Jon doesn’t have to _know_ he is touched by the Eye to know that he has a story to tell that would make his mouth water. 

“Jon.”

Martin's hands are lifted in the universal gesture for calming panic, and Jon's heart sinks at the alarm on his face. 

“Martin, I—”

 _I think he’s calling me._ He can feel it this time like he couldn’t in the Millbank tunnels. The dread seeps into him with icy clarity. None of this is anything he would willingly saddle Martin with, but If he can’t tell Martin, there’s no one. He doesn’t want to keep this new intimacy to himself; it feels too much like it could poison him if he did.

But how to begin? Should he start with the nightmares that haunt him as much as they do their dreamers? Martin knows them already. Should he start with the dreams of Jonah Magnus, free of fear save the devil Jon knows, the unease that sets in damningly late, long after the dream? They don't happen every night, just often enough that he can't forget. Could he even properly explain that split second of grief upon waking, before he remembers where he is, tucked in at Martin’s side with everything so close to all right—in being dragged from that calm, sheltered darkness and the weight of his gaze?

Saying so would only deepen the lines of concern etched into Martin’s brow. Besides, it’s not as though Martin doesn't have problems of his own without Jon adding to them. They've whiled away many a late morning when Jon is the one to make Martin tea as he stays in bed, dozing and staring into space for hours. Jon has carried them both through listless conversations where Martin is withdrawn and monosyllabic despite Jon’s best efforts, and his apathy plants a gnawing worry in Jon’s chest. Shame closes his mouth instead. 

“I'm sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Martin says sadly, and Jon is miserable with it even as his hands tremble for the postman.

“Here, let me just—can I try something?” Martin takes Jon’s face in his hands so, so carefully. Jon tenses and forces himself to relax. Martin leaves time for it, wants him to want this. He curls his fingers over Martin’s, and cradles his hand against his cheek. 

“I trust you.” 

Martin tastes like ginger when he kisses Jon, the soft press of his lips all steady reassurance. Jon makes a pleading noise low in his throat and clutches Martin’s wrist tighter. Something bright and tremulous swells in his chest that feels at once huge and paralyzing as the Eye that gazes upon him in his dreams—and smaller, somehow. His. 

It is over after a long, lingering moment, but Martin doesn’t draw away. He holds himself still as if afraid he’ll scare Jon off. 

“Okay?” 

Jon pulls back just a little, just to look at him, traces his fingertips over the arch of Martin’s brow, the curve of his cheekbone beneath his eye. The sun through the window behind him threads gold through the deep brown of Martin’s iris. 

“Okay,” Jon says, and means _I see you_. 

-

Martin’s suggestion ( _maybe it would be a good idea to get away for a while_ ) leads to Basira’s (Daisy’s safehouse) before Jon is forced to admit that, despite his misgivings about leaving London, it is undoubtedly the best option available to them. Fewer people means fewer opportunities to accidentally prey on unsuspecting statement-givers. Besides which, the further they are from the Institute, the better. 

Basira sees them off at King's Cross, brittle but stone-faced, with deep hollows under her eyes. On the platform, Jon steps toward her not knowing if he'll get her turned shoulder or a blank look, but he puts his arms around her, firm like a decision, and she lets him. 

She does nothing for a long moment. Then, with jerky movements, her arms come up around him, and she squeezes him back, fierce. 

“Thank you,” he says. “Thank you both.” It isn’t nearly enough. 

She shudders against him, says, “yeah,” muffled in the nap of his scarf, and clings tighter, before she steps back, blinking hard. 

“Don't waste it," she says.

-

Daisy’s safehouse is in the highlands, outside of some all but nameless village with a post office, a pay phone, a market, a church, and not much else. Mist is settling over the fields as they haul their bags up a hill and turn down an unpaved road bordered by hedges. 

Midway down the road, the crackle of branches on the other side of the hedge. They freeze. Stand stock-still in the middle of the road as a hulking, slow shape shifts in several places, and Jon is already thinking of Jared Hopworth, who had escaped through Helen’s doors and into the river, he could be anywhere now including _here_ —before a languid _moo_ cuts the trapped-animal tension that had caught them both on the edge of flight. 

They wilt with relief. Martin laughs nervously. Together, they make their way down to the gate a few meters further on, where the cows are huddled together by the hedge, the plumes of their breath rising to join the mist.

“Hi, guys,” Martin calls, clicking his tongue and cooing in a vain attempt to coax them over.

Later, Jon couldn’t be sure where it came from. But as they lean on the gate, squinting in the dusk to see them, Jon extends a supplicant hand in the cows’ direction, and a sound finds its way out of him: a whistle, at first, then humming, disparate notes barely tied to a melody, and then words. No one would ever call him much of a singer, but as he gains momentum, the sound starts to resemble music someone might have heard before.

“ _...'Twas never seen before,_  
_There was masts and yards and broken spars_  
_Come a-drivin’ on the shore.”_  


The cows, to their combined surprise and delight, prick up their ears at the song in a way they hadn't with the coaxing and start to amble over to the break in the hedge. Martin lets out an incredulous laugh and grabs Jon's arm. Jon falters, breathless, leans into him and keeps going. 

_“There was many a heart in sorrow_  
_There was many a heart so brave_  
_There were many a fine and hearty lad_  
_To find a watery grave._ ”

He forgets the verses after that, so he hums through the chorus with the fragments of the lyrics he knows and then gives over to the wind and the crushed-grass susurrus of the cows coming closer.

“What,” Jon says peevishly when he catches how Martin is looking at him, sweet and open. A skittish part of him still freezes at the idea that someone could look at him like that and mean it, that he could just...let himself be loved. Georgie would have said something in this moment, twined her arm with his and let her head rest on his shoulder, _this is happening, Sims, just accept it_. It comes to him in a flash that he has no clue what Martin is thinking, and he shifts on his feet, exposed, and wonders if the Eye is being miserly on a whim or if Martin simply has nothing awful in his thoughts at this particular moment. 

To his credit, Martin recovers admirably. 

“That's not a bit morbid?” he says, eyes twinkling. “For the cows, I mean. I hear they’re very sensitive, might be kinda put out that you're serenading them about drowning.”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Jon says. But now that he does, a weight settles leaden on his shoulders like the mist in the field beyond the cows. And as if it had been waiting, the knowledge slips through: sometimes, when it rains hard enough, these fields flood, and the animal dread of being swept away by the torrent of water, the foreign grief of missing a child and the dulled pain of missing a parent, all of it winds around Jon's neck, and the burden makes it hard to breathe. 

Jon startles when a curious nose nudges against his outstretched hand.

“There you are,” Jon says softly. He releases a careful breath, strokes along the coarse grain of fur between huge, dark eyes. “You don’t mind, do you?” 

-

The safehouse is not _quite_ as bad as it could be. There is a basic kitchen, spare but serviceable; a tired couch with an obvious spring beneath the cushion on the left side; a bedroom devoid of any furniture besides the modest bed, though fortunately there are plenty of blankets in the closet. 

The floors do look, possibly, as though someone could have scrubbed blood from them after committing murder a decade ago. Everything is layered in a coat of neglect, and Jon breathes a sigh of relief as he wipes dust from the kitchen counter with the flat of his hand.

They arrive late enough that they forsake grocery shopping and even dinner, but there is an electric kettle, a dusty, unopened box of tea, and an outrageous amount of firewood stacked under a tarp beneath the eaves at the back of the house, so they ferry some of the wood inside and see to the fire while Jon puts water on for tea. 

He carries their steaming mugs over from the kitchen as Martin lights the stacked tinder, the sterile chill of the house pushed back to the edges of the room by honeyed light that puts color in Martin’s face. Another sigh of relief, then, that the light touches Martin, that he is within Jon’s reach, focused and present with ash on his fingers that he tries not to smear on the blanket Jon drapes over them once they settle on the couch, the fire crackling steadily in the hearth. 

With so many miles between them and the Institute, the aching absence of the Archives is something Jon can ignore. Pressed to Martin’s side from shoulder to knee, Jon is warmed. 

-

“Was it a good dream this time?” Martin mumbles sleepily when Jon jolts awake flushed and sweating, his breath hitching on a broken-off sound. 

“What makes you ask?”

The rustle of blankets announces Martin's shrug. “I don’t know, you sounded like you were enjoying yourself.”

Elias—it was Elias this time—had been holding his chin still with a light touch and dotting something over his face. Practiced points scattered across his jaw, down the side of his neck and into his collar. The ritual of the gesture was somehow anticipatory, like applying makeup, as though he were preparing Jon to step out onto a stage under the heat of a spotlight and perform for an expectant audience. _This is how the lungs work. This is how sharp the knees are_. This is how you make an Archivist look like an Archivist.

“Aren't you satisfied yet?” Jon grumbled, tolerant only because the quiet rhythm was soothing after endless nights of impotence in the face of horror and certainly not because he liked to be here. 

Elias hummed. “Finishing touches,” he said. “You can't rush perfection.”

The absent way he said it quelled Jon’s twin impulses to bristle and then to flush, and he subsided into the ministrations with an ease that he tried not to dwell on and failed. The presumption should have bothered him when Elias set to unbuttoning his shirt, but it was just easy to stand there and let someone else steady him, and Elias's fingers were light and efficient, raising goosebumps in his wake as the loose cloth ghosted against Jon's skin. When he curled his hands around Jon’s waist, high beneath his abbreviated ribcage, Jon recognized the bruises left by Jared Hopworth’s many-fingered hands searching his insides, starkly tender against the grounding weight of Elias’s. 

Some current beneath that realization tugged at him, promised knowledge deeper and more terrible still. But then again, he reflected, as Elias drew a fingernail over the curve of Jon’s shoulder where Melanie had cut him, as Jon gasped when his skin parted readily as an open mouth before it healed over and lightened in a matter of seconds—then again, that undercurrent was nothing new where Elias was concerned, so perhaps it was just the man himself, the inexorable pull toward a secret that would destroy him. The gravity of the Eye. Jon resented it even as he was soothed by it. A pull that guided him, by turns, toward and away. 

At some point, Elias’s touch had started to linger; fingers splayed against Jon's throat to smooth Daisy’s careless knife wound into place. A thumb stroking his knuckles as he wound Jude Perry’s burn over Jon’s hand like the bandage that had covered it when first inflicted. Gratuitous scrape of fingernails through his hair. Each time a sweet hum of sensation, the ache of old wounds tempered by gentleness that had him swaying into each anchoring point of contact until finally, in a low voice, Elias said, “You've been careless with yourself, Jon.”

“Don't sound so pleased about it,” Jon muttered without much venom, then, belatedly: “What do you care? You've been perfectly happy to send me off to do the dirty work while you sit in your ivory tower. Does it please you to tend to your _pet_ Archivist?” For all that it came out sneering, referring to himself in such terms brought heat to his face. “What does it say about you that you’re only like this when it’s not real?” 

“Why shouldn’t this be real, Jon? I’ve been accused often enough of sentimentality, perhaps I’m simply indulging myself for a moment.” Elias was still holding Jon's hand in both of his and turned it up, so the silvery line of Michael’s interference could be traced across his palm. 

“Besides,” he continued, smile evident in his voice, “if you're going to be petulant, what does it say about _you_ that you let me?” 

Jon huffed indignantly, raised his eyes to glare. Of course Elias was already watching him. In fact, Elias—he was looking at him in much the same way Martin had looked at him singing to the cows, with a tenderness that thawed the icy hue of his eyes and made them crinkle at the corners. A warmth that didn’t belong there, but which hooked into his chest all the same and peeled the armor of his indignation away. 

"Stop,” he murmured. Like Jane Prentiss, the kind of love that burrows under skin and makes its home there. And still he didn’t pull away. Hadn't he just been telling himself to accept it?

Something flickered in Elias’s expression, that same intimate confidence from nights ago, before the lines of his face smoothed out and his smile grew sharp. Jon all but watched him file the emotion neatly away, unsure whether to be relieved or disappointed.

“What do you _want_?” he said at last.

“I wanted to say I’m proud of you.” Elias's words were clipped and ironic, as though he would have Jon believe he didn't mean it. “And I’ll be waiting, when you're ready.” 

“For what?” Jon pressed, finally summoning compulsion to ask the question that had lingered all these weeks. “Why did Peter Lukas say you got me if you won your wager?” 

Instead of answering, Elias drew his hand up to his mouth to brush a kiss to his knuckles. A strangely courtly gesture, and one that made Jon suck in a sharp breath. There was a finality to it, an incongruous sense of an ending. The unexpected bittersweetness of a goodbye. Then Elias tangled their fingers together and held the back of Jon’s hand to his chest—to his _heart_ , and Jon was already stiffening on reflex when Elias’s free hand curled around the back of his neck, his mouth falling open on a gasp. He wouldn’t even have wanted _Martin_ to hold him like this without the painstaking way he had telegraphed his every move in the stairwell that day—

But Elias didn’t try to kiss him, not on the lips. He bent to press his mouth to the hollow beneath Jon’s jaw where his heart was suddenly clamoring in his throat, though he couldn’t tell whether it was his or Elias’s; with his hand pressed soundly between their bodies, he felt them both racing, the one indistinguishable from the other. 

And then his voice, a thrum of sound against his pulse, the next closest thing to the blood in his veins, as Elias said, “ _We’ve still got work to do, Jon_.” 

Now, in the dark, Jon fits his fingers to that place, where his skin still tingles with phantom pressure. 

If he reaches, somewhere beyond what he can touch is a door with the weight of the ocean pushing against it. Soft hush of waves lapping, the promise of a gentle drowning. 

“Just the usual,” he tells Martin, and the tightness in his throat eases when Martin fumbles for him and finds the slope of his waist where his rib should be. 

-

The next morning, Martin goes into the village to call Basira and check the post and returns with a parcel full of statements. 

Jon opens the door, and drowns. 

-

“Please,” Martin whispers into his hair that night after the end of the world. They are curled together on the too-small bed. The sky above the safehouse is flame-scoured and void-black by turns, endless and nonexistent, fractal-twisted, bloodred, strung with spider webs. Always, it is rapt in its attention. 

Sometimes the sound of a battle hymn carries on the wind. Sometimes a lilting calliope organ. Despite this, Jon’s breath is steady and slow. Martin thinks he is asleep. 

“Please don’t leave again, not now. I love you,” he murmurs with a steadiness that anchors somewhere behind Jon’s ribs. “Please. Let that be enough.” 

Jon sleeps through the night and doesn’t dream.

-

Martin wakes to cold sheets in the bed beside him and panic tears him out of bed, across the room, and halfway into his coat before the fear ebbs into a low-grade terror, remote and strangely serene. Because he already expects the worst, maybe. All the fear is here, now, after all. He doesn't have to work to feel it. 

In the creeping half-light of a dawn still tinged in foreboding red, he tugs on coat and shoes over his pajamas, and is heading to the door when his eye catches on a figure in the gap between the loosely flapping firewood tarp and the shattered window that Martin had tried to cover to little success. 

“Oh, Jon,” Martin breathes, because Jon is out there, yes. He is lying in the yard a little way from the house, on his back in the freezing, wet grass. 

He is staring unblinking up at the sky. 

**Author's Note:**

> It did, in fact, occur to me that Martin is EMINENTLY more likely to be breaking into spontaneous song, but I am a fool for the Archivist having a terrible singing voice and singing anyway. The song in question is Three Score and Ten.
> 
> Title is from the Margaret Atwood poem.


End file.
